Posted
by
Soulskill
on Wednesday July 18, 2012 @06:05PM
from the chinese-moon-rocket-would-be-a-good-band-name dept.

MarkWhittington writes "AmericaSpace has published the results of a study of Chinese rocket development by Charles Vick, a noted expert on the Russian and Chinese space programs who works for GlobalSecurity.org, using Chinese language sources. Of note are the developing concepts for a super heavy launch vehicle designated as the CZ9 or Long March 9, capable of taking Chinese astronauts to the moon and points beyond. 'Liang outlined several new Long March versions, virtually all of them testing elements that would eventually find their way into the Long March 9 that has 4 million lb. more of liftoff thrust than the 7.5 million lb. thrust NASA Saturn V. Forty-three years ago this week a Saturn V propelled the Apollo 11 astronauts to the first manned landing on the Moon on July 20, 1969.'"

It's basic physics... make a heavy enough rocket and when you release the holding pin it will fall downwards, accelerating until it breaks free of the Earth's atmosphere. Then just turn it around and head to the moon.

Obviously, a US news source is going to use the largest NASA rocket ever flown as the basis for comparison, but I think their option 'A' design looks quite like the Soviet Energiya booster.

Saturn V was a single body launch vehicle - each stage was stacked on top of each other, and fired sequentially. This was simpler to assemble, but meant that two stages had to start in flight - one of which had to start twice! The first stage was LOx/RP-1 to get high thrust low in the Earth's atmosphere, and the upper stages were LOx/LH2 to get maximum delta-V.

Energiya, on the other hand, looked more like the US shuttle stack (and indeed, was used to fly the Soviet version of the space shuttle, the main difference being its ability to fly without the shuttle as its own rocket). It had a LOx/LH2 core stage, surrounded by 4 LOx/RP-1 boosters. All of the engines were started on the ground, at liftoff. Energiya was a mode 'modern' super heavy launch vehicle, as this approach is widely considered better these days.

Sensibly, the Chinese appear to have looked to the most recent super heavy (100t+ payload capacity) launch vehicle that successfully flew for design cues.

Sensibly, the Chinese appear to have looked to the most recent super heavy (100t+ payload capacity) launch vehicle that successfully flew for design cues.

There's nothing sensible about building a super heavy launcher that will only fly every couple of years.

Launch cost is largely driven by launch rate, so you'll save a ton of cash by splitting your lunar vehicle into smaller payloads which can launch on rockets that other people will use to launch their satellites. This is the equivalent of building a hundred-ton pickup truck to use when you move house, rather than just loading everything into a container and hiring a truck to deliver it to where you're goin

I'll just say, that the big launch method has worked a couple of times. The lots of little launches method has yet to work at all.

Sure, it works. If you have an infinite amount of money. America didn't, which is why NASA doesn't go to the Moon anymore.

If you actually want to be able to afford to go to the Moon and keep going there, then building your own massive, specialised rocket to launch you into orbit is absolutely, unquestionably the wrong way to do so.

"Unquestionably"? That is a pretty bold claim - especially when no mission, manned or unmanned, that has gone beyond Earth orbit has ever involved a rendezvous of separately launched components. The closest to doing so were the Gemini-Agena missions that got boosted to higher altitudes (which as partly a test run for a flight where the Agena was replaced by a centaur upper stage, and a Gemini flown around the Moon.)

Something that has never, ever been done in history cannot be "unquestionably" cheaper/faster

Well it's not like no one's ever successfully docked craft in orbit; that's been done many, many times with the various space stations and their resupply ships. Now, how well that experience translates to subsequently launching the assembled craft from orbit towards the moon or Mars, I don't know.

The big problem is that liquid Hydrogen won't keep long in space. A few hours, sure. A week? Not so much. So, if you are going to use the most efficient propellant, LEO rendezvous is very dicey. (If the second launch, the one with the crew, doesn't go on time, you spent a lot of money to orbit an empty tank.)

The Soviet plan was to land a return vehicle on the Moon, check it out, and then send a crew to land, walk over , and fly it back. The return vehicle could be hypergolic so there was no rush on the crew's timing. Everything could be sized this was to enable long stays on the Moon. They actually built this hardware, but of course it never flew. Given the close ties between the Russian and Chinese space efforts, look for the Chinese to do something broadly similar.

Apollo was actually 'Plan B". The original intention was to build a construction shack/space station in orbit, build a Lunar excursion vehicle there, and fly it to the Moon and back a few times. In the long run, it would have been cheaper, but it would have taken longer. By designing a single stack that threw away 99% to get that 1% to the Moon's surface and back, they saved time.

One of the Shuttle's proposed mission profiles was to cart materials to orbit in order to build that construction shack/lumar excursion vehicle to return to the Moon for long term missions.

And that mission profile required not a few more billion, but tens of billion more. Moreover, any conceivable savings, that are only available assuming it all works properly (and since when has first generation equipment ever been that perfect), is based on high flight rates. Seeing as the shuttle never could find enough payloads to justify its originally intended rate even before Challenger showed that rate as impossible I see no reason to believe we are suddenly going to need a weekly shuttle to the moo

Even 100 billion over 5 or 10 years really isn't that much. Vietnam was costing 4 billion a year and more at the peak. The cost of our 3 current wars would turn your hair white.

The original order for Shuttle was what, 8? They cut the funding down to 4 and a pair for testing, then made a big noise about Enterprise as a test bed. It never flew. 8 shuttles could have flown about every 10 weeks with plenty of time to inspect and repair the birds between flights. Just double up on the inspection/repair cr

So what you're saying is that we should kill the funded program because a massively more expensive program might be better if we were to ever convince congress to fund it a level unprecedented even compared to Apollo. And that is for a distinctly specific vision of "better" that doesn't involve any concept of going beyond the moon and does involve lots of people stationed on the moon with little in the way of specific purpose.
Aside from being a convenient place to stick telescope arrays I have yet to see

Don't forget what a spectacularly high failure rate Gemini Agena had.
If the ISS taught us anything it's that we CAN assemble thing on orbit, but it isn't cheap, easy or problem free. I've never understood the hostility in some quarters to anything much larger than an ICBM. With every single proposed design the larger vehicles ARE cheaper on per kg, let alone per mission, basis. Some hypothetical SSTO is all well and good if you can go out and get me the funding for it, but don't tell me we shouldn't be bu

There is a 400-tonne spacecraft in orbit around the Earth right now. It carries a crew of between 6 and 12 people in a shirt-sleeve environment and it was put together, is kept supplied and intermittently boosted in orbit by a range of vehicles which each have a payload capability of less than 20 tonnes.

If the Chinese are serious about building the Long March 9 superlifter as a "one-shot mission" stack they are further back down the technology history books than I thought they were, given they've already

You are absolutely right that launch rate is what is IMPORTANT. It is the fixed costs (launch pad, ground crew, etc) that chew up your money.

The the smart thing is to get a 50 tonne FH going, multiple human launchers and most importantly, multiple destinations. Even now, I view sending up a BA-sundancer or so to the ISS as being the most important thing that NASA can do. The reason is that by helping BA get moving, then they will put up multiple EO systems. That gives a reason to have large launch rates.

All of the engines were started on the ground, at liftoff. Energiya was a mode 'modern' super heavy launch vehicle, as this approach is widely considered better these days.

If it's so widely considered "better", then why does practically no-one actually use it? Not that it's actually modern either - rather it was used during the very earliest days when starting inflight was a huge unknown, and then later dropped except for the R-7 and the earliest Atlases.

What do you mean nobody uses it? Ariane 5 works this way exactly, and it one of the best commercial launchers available. All rockets with boosters work this way to a certain extend. It is generally accepted that you get more reliability the more engines you start on the ground (even single body Falcon 9 adheres to this in a different way - 9 engines started (and checked) on the ground, 1 in the air.

Um, no. Ariane 5 doesn't work like that all - it has a 2nd stage that ignites in flight.

It is generally accepted that you get more reliability the more engines you start on the ground (even single body Falcon 9 adheres to this in a different way - 9 engines started (and checked) on the ground, 1 in the air.

Which of course it not what you claimed - which was that "all motors are started on the ground". Something that has never been com

The submission and at least one of the linked articles are just silly "OMG CHINA" rabble-rousing in an attempt to justify the diversion of NASA resources from commercial providers like SpaceX towards giant white elephants like the SLS heavy-lift rocket (and the legacy contractors behind it). I've yet to see any evidence that China's supposed plans for a heavy-lift rocket are anything more than sketches from dreamy engineers, without any actual funding behind them; if anything other non-existent heavy-lift rockets like SpaceX's Falcon XX have more progress behind them.

If anything, indications so far suggest that China's space exploration plans involve the more sensible approach of assembling exploration modules in space, instead of building rarely-used mega-rockets that launch everything up at once.

Actually, I am hoping that if O is re-elected, that he will kill of the SLS, and then use just 10B (instead of 20B for a single 70 tonne) to get TWO SHLVs with 150 tonnes or so via a COTS approach. The other 10B should then be used to restore NERVA as well as a COTS for various tug engines and designs. At the same time, use some of help private space get to the moon so that we can re-establish ourselves there, while NASA is focused on Asteroids and Mars.

Yes, we will hear all the neo-cons and RWNJ on this site screaming about O killing off Constellation as well as the SLS. Yet, it is absolutely WORTHLESS.

Instead, we should kill off the SLS TODAY and focus on getting private launchers going for human launches, as WELL as the multiple companies doing inflatable space stations.
THEN create a COTS program for TWO SHLV. It should carry around 150 tonnes to LEO, cost under 5B to produce in under 4 years, and under.5B to launch. 2 companies would then win the b

False.
It makes sense to get man off this planet. In fact, it is insane NOT to get us off here. We are the first species on this planet that has this capability to save itself by being on multiple other planets.
The other issue is that many wars have been fought over resources. Minerals are needed. Less than 6 months ago, we saw that China invaded American waters to grab fish. Now, they were caught in Russian waters doing the same thing. Then you add the fact that China cut a deal with Philippines just a c

We are the first species on this planet that has this capability to save itself by being on multiple other planets.

Save itself from what?

The other issue is that many wars have been fought over resources. Minerals are needed. Less than 6 months ago, we saw that China invaded American waters to grab fish. Now, they were caught in Russian waters doing the same thing. Then you add the fact that China cut a deal with Philippines just a couple of months ago to withdraw their boats, and even before the ink is

Yes, I was refering to that. However, there is a real reason why 'Nam and other nations asked USA to help. China is pushing their weight around. More importantly, all of the Chinese neighbors KNOW that it will not only continue, but increase. As I pointed out, they are increasing aggression towards ALL of their neighbors.

And what does a mongolian have to do with the today's Communist China?

First off, Alaska was bought from Russia.
Secondly, to claim that any part of USA was part of Mexico is a joke. Mexico was fighting against the NATIVES here. Mexico had less than 7K ppl over the ENTIRE area. NONE of this land belonged to Mexico. It belonged to the Native Americans. They are the ONLY ones that have a legitimate grip.

Nuts, when texas broke off from Mexico in 1836 (almost 200 years ago), Mexico had it for only 15 years. In addition, the population of Mexicans and Americans was a TOTAL of l

I'll bet that the Chinese will set foot on the Moon and claim it for themselves, regardless of any long-standing International agreements to the contrary.

..and yes, I know this post will get modded down to "-1, Troll" and I'll get flamed for posting this. Haters gonna hate; I'm expressing my opinion, and I don't care who likes or dislikes it. I don't trust the Chinese government; I have been given no reason to.

Eh, there's plenty of water here on the earth. Plutonium isn't naturally occurring, so I'm not sure where you're getting that. "Other minerals" are also here on the earth. As far as HE3 is concerned, we don't know what to do with it, so I'm not sure why they would go to the moon to get it.

And the ability to live off world is useful how?

If that's your idea of "starters" I can't even imagine how useless the items further down the list are.

It is cheaper to put water into LEO from here, then it is from the moon.
There is U on the moon which can be bred into Pu. This can then be used for a number of devices in space. Not just for mankind, but rovers and sats.
Other minerals can be denied access to.

And has been pointed out by brilliant ppl the world over (hawking comes to mind), our staying on earth is simply putting all of our eggs in one basket. Life goes extinct every so often. Normally, it is about 27 million years, but we never know when

It is cheaper to put water into LEO from here, then it is from the moon.
There is U on the moon which can be bred into Pu. This can then be used for a number of devices in space. Not just for mankind, but rovers and sats.
Other minerals can be denied access to.

There isn't any reason to put water into LEO or breed plutonium on the moon. We have more plutonium than we know what to do with already, and if we run out we can make more here. You keep thinking we can use this or that resource on the moon because

..and the AC has it. Did everyone else forget about The Moon Is A Harsh Mistress already?

Let's assume the Chinese build a mass driver (assuming you could actually build one) on the moon and threatened to drop heavy rocks on us. The proper response would be "If you do that, we're going to turn your country into a vast expanse of radioactive glass." Trillions of yuan wasted because they forgot we had nukes. Stupid Chinese!

Apparently you have no imagination, which here in the U.S. anymore doesn't surprise me one bit, all the imagination, critical thinking skills, and initiative have been bred out of or trained out of just about everyone.

If by that you mean I'm an engineer who can actually analyze a concept without going all starry-eyed, well, that's true. Clearly you spent too much time reading science fiction and not enough studying actual science. It's fine to use your imagination, but at some point you need to leaven it with some connection with reality.

Yeah, like I said: You have NO imagination, none whatsoever, and furthermore you sound like an absolute prick, likely tedious as hell to have to deal with personally, as rude as any kid from 4chan online, and you can go fuck yourself.

Apparently you have no imagination, which here in the U.S. anymore doesn't surprise me one bit, all the imagination, critical thinking skills, and initiative have been bred out of or trained out of just about everyone.

Maybe if you don't want people to treat you like an asshole you shouldn't act like one.

You know those inscrutable aliens in sci-fi films that have indecipherable glyphs on the sides of their spaceships: They're Chinese.

Actually, someone found a stone tablet, somewhere near Siberia. They carbon dated it, and it supposed to be like more than 5 millions year old

On that stone tablet were carvings that looks very much like some ancient Chinese characters

I had the link once, but unfortunately I lost it (hard disk crashed).

I tried to search for it, to no avail.

Skittery dinosaur tracks could look like Chinese characters to the sort of person that can see Jesus in a slice of toast. Although, these days believing in dinosaurs and Jesus at the same time seems to be verboten, even though we managed it quite peaceably for almost two centuries after the scientific classification of dinosaurs.

The Brits have been pushing this kind of technology for decades (remember HOTOL?) but it seems to take a while for it to get any traction. Shame really, the potential is staggering. The demise of Concorde had more to do with its introduction coinciding with the oil embargo, it was conceived in the days of cheap fuel and its high consumption would have been less of an (economic) issue. I don't see any such issues with a hydrogen powered engine since producing hydrogen doesn't absolutely have to depend on hy

People investing in aerospace who don't understand the difference between kerosene and hydrogen as fuels, deserve to lose their money. I should hope people dumping millions into a project would do a little bit of homework.

Yeah, and space is just as big as the Atlantic Ocean too. Great comparison.

You're absolutely right. We must never ever compare one type of technological advancement with another because you can only ever compare two absolutely identical things before drawing any meaningful conclusion.

You might as well argue with the wall. The overwhelming mentality on Slashdot, as seen by the poster here, is that space travel is a total waste of money and that we need to invest in wars and occupations instead. If you're looking for a haven for space geeks and sci-fi fans, this isn't it.

LOL right, that's what I read on here every night.....and also love letters to George Bush. Uh......are you sure you've actually read Slashdot?

The problem I see with space travel is, going to Mars doesn't actually help us get into the rest of the galaxy. It's not actually a stepping stone......to escape the Solar System, we need new fundamental research in physics and material science. Going to Mars could actually divert from that.

LOL right, that's what I read on here every night.....and also love letters to George Bush. Uh......are you sure you've actually read Slashdot?

I don't know how you have your friends/foes list set up, but I see tons and tons of comments here parroting the Republican/tea party agenda, supporting the wars, etc. I also see a fair number of opposing comments, but those mostly seem to be from non-Americans.

Going to Mars is IMO a stepping stone in that it helps get people out into space and building experience i

"Space travel" represents the peak of our technology, there's nowhere to go. It's done, it's over. It's soooo *not* like the Wright Brothers it's not even funny. The fact that you can't grasp this, as a group, says it all about you.

OK, so our technology has peaked out.

Didn't I see you standing there when Ooog invented the wheel? And wasn't it you that said "What good is this 'wheel' thing you 'invented' that will cause the gods to hate us? Why can't you be reasonable and have your wife pack all your shit on her back like everybody else does?'

'Reasonable' people refuse to rock the boat. 'Reasonable' people embrace and defend the status quo. Status quo means 'freeze in place', nothing moves. Not even you. So, go ahead and stand in place, don't move. The unreasonable among us are moving on.

Space travel at this stage of the game is engineering. We're still developing the engineering to do it cheaper and better. Now, the next little bit is going to take some thinking, so if you wanna take a nap first, that's okay, this comment will still be here when you wake up.

You want clean air, water, land, whatever, there are exactly two and only two options to get it. Option 1 is come up with a way to destroy every piece of technology everywhere on the planet, down to and including the ability to make fire, and turn the entirety of the human species back into a hunter-gatherer tribal society. Downside of this is, the planet cannot support 7 billion people at the stage of hunter-gatherers. It'd be closer to half a million, maybe a million, spread all over the globe. High level apex predators need large areas to hunt in, they can't be supported in small areas. This means there's not a lot of them. And as the current champion apex predator, we're dangerously overextended without our technology.

Option 2 is move all havey industry like metal refining and dangerous chemical processes into orbit and beyond. Get it out of the atmosphere where its poluting byproducts can be blown away by the solar wind. Bonus is, the raw materials are readily at hand, just need a nudge to put them in orbit around Earth where they can be harvested. Again, this is an engineering problem, and like all engineering problems, you solve it by throwing engineers at it.

Go ahead, be 'reasonable'. Fight for the status quo. Fight for decreasing resources increasingly more inaccessible. Fight to keep funnelling what wealth is left into the pockets of the 1%. Just don't complain when us unreasonable blokes run you over on our way to the future.

History is filled with intransigent people like yourself that do not believe we will ever grow beyond our current mold, that certain topics are not worth pursuing as they will never bear fruit, etc. A good example are those skeptical about the future of artificial intelligence moving away simple heuristics and mathematical models, despite that "full"-brain simulation, at least at the neuronal level, is now not a matter of if, but when:

You can weep all you want but this is a problem we need to solve. I wouldn't be giving up too soon. I see in you blog you saying you lost heart when the shuttle blew up. Well, this is a risky business and people die. The astronauts know it and accept it. We waste more fuel on silly pointless wars than we consume in space travel. You seem too ready to give up. Fine. Get out of the way.

Let them go to 'and places beyond' in their fancy shmancy 12 million lb. thrust rocket. It's far more cost effective and easy, to send probes and rovers to other places in this solar system. The real question is, 'Who will be first to manipulate the higgs field in such a way that will allow for light speed or near light speed travel'?

Tut. Them is us. Who will be.. it's one of us. We're all humans here, when it comes to the effort to get into space. Terrans, if you like. We (outside the States) are as proud of what you folks (I assume you're in the US?) did in the 20th century as you are. We (the world) look forward to great things from all nations (including the US) in this 21st century. Let's all take pride in the Space exploits of this planet's inhabitants. That's our species, risking their lives.

I doubt human lift is the goal. This is a way to get more robots up. Once I had seen a video of telepresence underground heavy mining equipment i had an idea how its going to play out. Semi-autonomous robotic industry.

Given the thermal gradients, I wouldn't be surprised by a closed cycle heat engine driving them.. i'm sure it works out better than solar panels.

When the Apollo 11 astronauts toured the world after their successful landing they were surprised to hear people everywhere, even in the USSR, exclaim "We did it!" Not "You did it", but "We", as though the entire human race had participated.

They have the same claim to "We did it!" as the majority of americans who weren't personally involved. Either you limit it to the 12 astronauts actually on the moon, the severall ten thousands involved in the apollo program or not at all.

Indeed, that was true. I'm pretty sure almost everyone on the planet with access to a TV watched it that night, and for a short while it seemed like everyone in the world was celebrating together. Nationalism went right out the door for a while.

To my understanding it still holds the record for the largest percentage of televisions in the world being tuned to a single program. It was carried live even in China and the USSR. The World Cup has more viewers now, but there are also a frack of a lot more televisions available today than in 1967.

Going camping with friends tomorrow, and we'll hoist a cup to the Apollo 11 team.

It probably depends on your definition of "spacecraft". To launch a probe anywhere in the system, sure, the Saturn V is sufficient. But look at the size of the craft that the Saturn V sent to the Moon; it wasn't all that large. 3 men in a capsule plus a lander, plus a rover on one or two missions. If you want to launch a larger craft with 6 or 10 astronauts, and some more heavy cargo for them to set up at the destination, you'll need a bigger rocket most likely. Or if you want to launch a craft big enough for 3-4 people to live somewhat comfortably on a mission to Mars (which would take months, not days like the Moon mission, requiring much more supplies and living space), again you'll need a bigger rocket than the Saturn V.

Of course, you can also get away with smaller rockets by splitting things up and launching them on separate rockets, and then joining them together in orbit before continuing the mission.

No need to join them up. Send the cargo on ahead and you know it will be there when you get there.

Wouldn't work for a longer-term mission like going to Mars, as you've still got to send a lot of stuff for the astronauts to use along the way. You've also got to pack a lot more shielding due to the increased duration of exposure to solar radiation. Not impossible to deal with, but definitely a lot more mass overall and it's far easier to get that stuff to orbit in several pieces.